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I don't do a lot of heavy spreadsheet work, so I absolutely love the look of Numbers.

Every application in iWork opens up really snappy and fast and also looks elegant. For me, their MS Office 2008 counterparts look really ugly and run slow. I know that Excel is incredibly powerful in features, but Numbers suits my purposes.
 
I got it a while back and pages does everything you can expect of it, keynote's getting there but numbers is missing a lot, and what's there can sometimes be very hard to use because Apple have tried to over-simplify everything - that, or it's just me coming from years of Excel.
 
I write for a living. For a long time I used Office v.X, which I got in 2003 with a TiBook. I really liked it. Then I decided that I better try out some alternatives and get more up to date. I tried Office 2008 and it was awful - slow and buggy on my MBP, and could barely run on my PBG4. Then I tried Pages and liked it a lot, but exporting all of my documents to PDF or Doc to share them with people was a pain.

In the end I went back to Office v.X - but in the future I could see standardizing on Pages. As far as I'm concerned Office 2008 is worthless. I also like the Excel that comes with Office v.X.

Office v.X isn't bad, but the latency is still a problem. Unfortunately it doesn't work at all with Leopard on my 17-inch iMac Core Duo.
 
I love iWork and I use it for all my presentations, assignments, rapports and such. There are many templates to choose from, and almost every time a template that suits exactly what you want to do. It's easy to use and there are no bugs as far as I'm aware.

I use Microsoft Office because to open all the files that my teachers uploads, but I rarely write papers in it, not that it's bad, but I actually feel more comfortable with iWork. I agree with most of all in here, try out the trial and see for yourself, I think it's a question about taste.
 
I have iWork and while i like it. I am somewhat tempted to get office '08 I loved office '07 and if this is even a bit like it. I will really like it. It so versatile. Numbers is ok. I took a course on excel and man it can do so much more than Numbers, it's crazy. I like Keynote but Powerpoint '07 has also impressed me maybe I have to learn some more of the advanced features.

I use pages a lot and it is quite nice, but it really sucks when you and a few other people are working on a project and your the only one with pages. Everyone else has word it makes it difficult to send and receive files especially with formatting. However overall iWork is pretty good. The real problem is that office will always be number one making it difficult not to get.

I really wish though that Microsoft had a 30 day trial for '08 like they did for '04. That would really help me make my decision.
 
If you always look in the wrong places you'll always find the wrong thing.

No that's not it. I actually have found every single feature that i've needed on pages and they perform just fine.

Its just the feel for the program isn't there for me.

It's probably because i'm so accustomed to MS Office, but then again, I did fall in love with NeoOffice for a while too..so i dont know what it is :p
 
We switched our office from MS Office to iWork. We mostly use Pages and Numbers. Numbers needs more work, but, has a lot of potential.

Pages is great and has all the features we need. The only problem is sharing Pages documents with others. As a Pages file is actually a folder, you can't easily upload them to online project managers and such. So, it's necessary to create a PDF of the document. This is fine most of the time, but, not when you want to upload an editable Pages document for someone.

I have rarely used Keynote, so, can't comment on that.
 
No that's not it. I actually have found every single feature that i've needed on pages and they perform just fine.

Its just the feel for the program isn't there for me.

It's probably because i'm so accustomed to MS Office, but then again, I did fall in love with NeoOffice for a while too..so i dont know what it is :p

Actually, I think it is. For one thing, the included templates are completely optional. For another, one of the strengths of Pages is the ability to create custom templates that meet your needs. If you haven't discovered and explored those capabilities, then your reaction to the "feel" being too "artsy" is a result of looking in the wrong places, IMO.
 
Actually, I think it is. For one thing, the included templates are completely optional. For another, one of the strengths of Pages is the ability to create custom templates that meet your needs. If you haven't discovered and explored those capabilities, then your reaction to the "feel" being too "artsy" is a result of looking in the wrong places, IMO.
Well there it is then, exactly, you're right sir.
I guess pages is great if you want to spend time creating your own templates.

For the rest of use who just want to get something done quickly, and want to find nice templates that look professional, Word is the processor of choice because you can find thousands of templates online (I know you can find pages templates online, but it doesn't rival the amount of templates Office has), and the inbuilt ones are pretty professional looking.

I'm not a "artiste" or a newspaper editor who needs to create his own templates, nor will i ever waste my time doing so. Pages is a type of a program that suits that need more of someone who wants to create their document to look good, and by doing it manually sort of how Latex is on Linux.

But for the rest of us "dumb template using" folk Office is nice and so is NeoOffice.

As for the feel part, well I'll put it this way...Imagine it this way...You've probably used iTunes and love it right? (I'm assuming this because your a mac user)..Now go onto Windows and use Windows Media Player for your music...I'm pretty confident that you wouldn't like the feel of it compared to iTunes or the way it does things compared to iTunes. It's somewhat the same for me with Pages. I've used MS Office my entire life and am used to the way things are and they work perfectly fine. Once I switch to Pages its completely weird for me and it has all the features that MS Word has but they just don't feel like the same thing, if you catch my drift?.

I don't know why but you seemed to take my opinion as an attack against Pages? I apologize for treading on your Word Processor of choice...but really, I personally don't like it. I'm not telling people to run away from it, or that it's the crappiest program created...its just that a majority of of the people that come on here reading this thread have used MS Office in the past and they should understand that this a different program that they will have to LEARN to use, and frankly a lot of people dont like that. Also if money is a deciding factor in the Office Suite you buy, then why not try free alternatives like NeoOffice or OepnOffice?

So I'm sorry if I offended you in any manner I did not mean to, and I hope you understand why I personally don't like Pages. I guess if I take time to learn the program, I will love it, but for now MS Office is the way to roll for me.
 
An attack? No, I just think you're wrong.

Creating templates in Pages is easy. I'm not an "artiste" either, just someone who writes for a living. I can tell you that our reports look far better and more consistent than any produced by our competitors, including some much bigger companies, and it didn't take a lot of effort to make them that way. Thank you, Apple.

I've found that the vast majority of complaints about Pages come from people who've never spent any significant time learning how to use it. All they know is it doesn't work exactly like Word. For a lot of people this is a problem. For others it's a godsend.
 
An attack? No, I just think you're wrong.

Creating templates in Pages is easy. I'm not an "artiste" either, just someone who writes for a living. I can tell you that our reports look far better and more consistent than any produced by our competitors, including some much bigger companies, and it didn't take a lot of effort to make them that way. Thank you, Apple.

I've found that the vast majority of complaints about Pages come from people who've never spent any significant time learning how to use it. All they know is it doesn't work exactly like Word. For a lot of people this is a problem. For others it's a godsend.
Touché :cool:
 
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